On 09/09/2013 11:58 AM, Mike A wrote:

On Thu, Sep 05, 2013 at 07:12:36PM +0000, Warren Bailey wrote:

...

Anyone else see this coming?

US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet

http://gu.com/p/3thvv

Yes, long, long ago. I just didn't expect to see it revealed.

This is really only a 'work-around' by the NSA, meaning they get around strong encryption by going directly to the source of the unencrypted data (eg. google/yahoo/M$ servers), or by potentially posing as a "trusted" CA. Like Snowden said back in June, good encryption still works. There still isn't enough compute power available to bruteforce open-spec encryption, using peer-reviewed, popular open source software. I say "popular" because it should be a project in active development that has the code monitored and reviewed often (I'm no software engineer, so I can't read source code). PGP still works...assuming the NSA already doesn't have a backdoor in your modem/chipset firmware (since there aren't any free firmware/libs for any modern SoC that I know of)...or a backdoor trojan on your system...or a super secret root kit on your old Fedora Core 2 system (swear I don't have any Fedora Core systems left..). Moral of the story, stay away from the centralized services and commercial encryption software. And write your own custom firmware for you phone's wifi/cell chip. Start by helping these guys out - http://replicant.us/ ;) -- _____________________ Phil Gardner PGP Key ID 0xFECC890C OTR Fingerprint 6707E9B8 BD6062D3 5010FE8B 36D614E3 D2F80538